‘You don’t have to entertain me on that account. I’m not the sort to hold grudges or seek a petty revenge, Elegy.’
‘Who said you were?’ Both boots off, she smiled. ‘Are you going to take part or just watch?’
I drew up my feet and began keying open one of my boots.
‘My mother, in an enlightened age, believed she could affirm the “spiritual” portion of her makeup by ignoring what she considered the “animal” portion,’ Elegy told me, peeling her jumpsuit down from her shoulders and revealing the brown half circles of her upper breasts. ‘Technically, she’s still a virgin. Chaney honored her hands-off policy to the very end – I don’t know, he may have believed exactly as she did. For that matter, the policy may have originated with him. In any case, I’m convinced that by striving so hard for the angelic and turning their backs on the animal, they never quite edged over into the fully human.’
‘I never knew that Chaney,’ I said. ‘He always seemed to me a man trying to define himself as best he could under circumstances that distorted his every definition. But he came closer than any of the rest of us, Elegy, and I admired him for the attempt.’
Elegy was gracefully out of her clothes, and our tryst beneath the bright nylon awning seemed both to illustrate and to mock her story of her mother’s division of human nature into spiritual and animal halves. Highfalutin words floating in gyres above the primitive lusts. The trick seemed to be to get them spiraling through each other in precision concert. But for the moment Elegy’s hemispherical breasts had me hypnotized and unmanned. I stared at them with mute, little-boy pleasure and they stared unabashedly back.
‘Go ahead and look,’ Elegy said indulgently. ‘They’re a sexual signal at least as much as they’re a maternal adaptation.’
I knew what she was referring to – the supposition that the human female’s breasts have evolved as they have in order to mimic the fleshy buttocks used aeons ago by female hominids to signal adult males of their readiness to mate. The gradual development of an upright posture and efficient bipedalism selected for similar anatomical signals in front. Hence, hairless, rounded breasts in the female descendants of those still unplaceable ancestral hominids of ours. Not to mention the frontal self-mimicry of the red genital labia inherent in the protruding lips of our mouths and the ever-recurrent tendency of human females to paint them pink or scarlet. Originally, such disquieting evolutionary suppositions imply, we were designed to copulate belly to butt and to take our pleasure with the impersonal animal efficiency of baboons or chimpanzees. Maybe that’s why women, at one time more thoroughly socialized in tenderness and nurture than males, often seem to find regressive variations on frontal intercourse degrading or animalistic. I don’t know. All I know is that by inviting me to look without embarrassment on her naked breasts Elegy set off in me a free-associational nightmare of Asadi belly-to-butt gymnastics that embarrassed me mightily.
‘What’s the matter, Ben?’ She was concerned rather than simply amused – although I think she could have easily burst out laughing, had she not held herself back – and that helped blanch the redness out of my face.
‘It’s been awhile,’ I told her lamely. And the last time, I recollected gloomily, in a ball booth on Night Drag Boulevard with a middle-aged woman whose secret peccadillo was biting savagely into a crème-de-menthe nougat at the moment of orgasm. She only got to do that once. Once was enough.
‘Don’t worry,’ Elegy counseled me. ‘It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget how.’
‘People get too old to ride bicycles, Elegy.’
‘You haven’t, have you?’
So I finished shedding my clothes, and with no one watching but my cool, astrally disembodied self and the Pock-Marked Man in Melchior, I discovered that I truly hadn’t . . .
I was still asleep at dawn. Elegy had to awaken me to say that Kretzoi had departed for the Asadi clearing and that we had a full day ahead before he came back to report his progress.
Elegy behaved toward me as she always had, neither more doting nor more aloof than usual, the only difference being her freeness in touching me as we strolled about the camp or talked with each other in the helicraft. These touches gave me a sort of grinning pleasure (except that I suppressed the grins) and a ridiculously improved opinion of myself. At the same time, I began to worry about what failure would do to Elegy. Her single-minded desire to discover both the Asadi pagoda and the fate of Egan Chaney had sustained her for the last several years, and now that desire – that commitment – was irrevocably on the line.
We spent the morning writing and transcribing notes. During the afternoon I again raised the possibility that Kretzoi’s monotonous labors among the Asadi might fail to turn up anything new or useful about them. This discussion led me to plot strategies for the future. I suggested a trek northward, in the supposed direction of the pagoda. I proposed that Kretzoi might eventually act as something of an agent provocateur. Perhaps if he suddenly began behaving in anomalous ways, he would prod the Asadi into rare but revealing behaviors of their own. The prime argument against this unorthodox tack, Elegy pointed out, was of course the risk to Kretzoi himself.
‘We’re going to have to do something,’ I told her in turn. ‘I don’t expect the Asadi to spill their innermost psychological secrets to us in the next few days. They haven’t in six years, Elegy, and your father learned as much as he did, I feel sure, only because he happened to go among them during a cycle in which they were preparing to designate a new absentee chieftain. And the time of his arrival was pure chance.’
‘He also had patience and persistence on his side.’
‘But I don’t, Elegy. And although you and Kretzoi may,
